My Favourites

September 12, 2009

The Games that GarageGames Plays?

A few weeks back, I wrote about my experiences with GarageGames‘ iTGB product and what I found missing from it, as well as how the product could be improved. Of course, my blog doesn’t have that many regular readers and I don’t update it that much. So the notes were just for those searching Google for opinions on iTGB so that they would know all the facts before they bought the product. So I was rather surprised when I received a rather vitriolic comment on the second post about iTGB which attacked me rather than provide anything more concrete about the iTGB product itself than to say that GarageGames is “one of the very few companies that’s out there trying to provided productive tools for development on the most open, accessible platform there is today.” (his words, not mine).

The comment did read a bit as if it had been written by a GarageGames employee and I said so in my response to him. And I also re-iterated the points that I was complaining about with regards to iTGB – that GarageGames was misrepresenting iTGB as an easy to use tool when it really wasn’t. Plus, their support (both pre- and post-sales) is barely there since they seem to depend on users searching their forums. Why pay a lot of money for a product which is billed a “professional” level when the support just isn’t professional level?

He came back with more vitriol and personal attacks about my competency to judge the product but never really responded to the “sock puppet” thing except to deflect it with a comment about how he liked sock puppets and so on.

If there had been one comment, I would have thought that the guy was somebody who came across the blog accidentally and was just hurt by the besmirching of the good name (as he saw it) of one of his favourite products. But two comments? That seemed a bit beyond the call of duty. So I took a look at my comments section and I noticed that both comments had come from the same IP.

So I did a look up on the IP and this is what I found (I’ve taken out parts of the page and am showing only the two relevant bits):

Hmm … so the comments were coming from somebody who was staying at a hotel in London? What business traveler actually takes the time to respond to blog posts if they are traveling? That looked a little suspicious. Of course, one might point out that I had no reason to actually believe that s/he was a business traveler or that s/he wasn’t an employee at the hotel or that the person might have been on vacation and spending a rainy day indoors by looking for some trolling action. All of this was possible But the tone of the e-mail and the rabid defense of GarageGames, made me think, now more than ever, that this might be an employee of GarageGames.

So I checked on another thing. I checked my Apache server logs to see if the person had come from Google or some other search engine to my site. I wasn’t very surprised to find that this wasn’t the case. They weren’t referred from another site but came to my site directly – probably via a bookmark or a link from an e-mail.

Sure, again, this wasn’t conclusive proof. There are utilities around that help you erase your tracks, to hide referrers and so on. But it was beginning to look more and more (at least to me) as if this person was from GarageGames and was simply trying to make the company appear look good by making all sorts of claims. Honestly, it would have made GarageGames look much better if they’d listened to my constructive criticism and made some changes. But this probably was cheaper (Again, I should try to be objective and mention that it’s possible that GarageGames as a corporation might not have known about this little stunt. It might have been just one individual acting on their own.)

Anyway, I didn’t see much point in following this up further because I didn’t have conclusive proof. Plus, the individual never came back and so I just let it go. That was, till today. Today I was taking a look at the GarageGames forums for something and came across this post:

What? A GarageGames employee was actually visiting London the same week that the comments appeared on my post from a London hotel? How coincidental can that be? (Actually, to be fair, it still could be coincidence but it’s beginning to seem more and more like it isn’t …) According to his profile, Brett Seyler is an employee of GarageGames (and I think I read somewhere else that he was director of technology or marketing or something …).

So did Brett Seyler post those comments? I don’t know. It’s possible that this was still done by somebody not connected to GarageGames. It’s also possible that there were other GarageGames employees traveling with Brett and the comments came from one of them rather than Brett himself. I have no way of knowing. But the evidence is piling up against GarageGames and if these shenanigans indeed were carried out by one of their employees, then they are indeed rather contemptible. Fix the issues, acknowledge you have issues, don’t try to intimidate people and spread false propaganda – that’s how I would approach it. But then again, I’m not a corporate type

I think you have made some incorrect assumptions and poor accusations here and I really think the way that you have gone around to bring attention to this lacks professionalism. Seriously, you think any company has nothing better to do but try to follow you around in forums and post their own opinion follow-ups?

If this was the case, which I can safely say it isn’t. Its important to note that GarageGames employees do not need to result to shenanigans like this to get their point across, they post as themselves. They have nothing to gain by posting as anonymous users just like how they didnt respond to you via email as an anonymous email account.

Secondly, Tau is an actual 3rd party developer in the GarageGames community (he goes by the name FunkyDiver now). But I guess your sleuthing failed to notice that.

lastly, before you take some assumptions and think that I am a GG employee, you are very wrong. I am not employed by GarageGames, but I am a user of their game engine software and have produced numerous games with it using TGE, TGEA, TGB, iTGB and soon Torque3D. While I will agree that at times their support can be slow (if you don’t know how to post about it), I also have to say that I do not pay for direct support, which is an option each and every user of their engine can opt into having for an additional price. The level of support that GarageGames gives is certainly no different than you will find for other 3D game engines on the market such as Unity and I have seen much larger companies like Adobe have even worse support where you get absolutely no help from the company itself and have to rely entirely on peer to peer support for softare that costs upwards of 10x the cost of what you pay for iTGB. You certainly don’t get any different support from Epic for a 500k Unreal license (if anything, much worse). Even with Microsoft and Autodesk software you need to purchase a seperate support contract if you want direct support from them on problems… so I kind of fail to see how you feel that your complaints about their supports mean that their a poor company with a poor product when what they are doing is an industry norm.

Logan, you’re entitled to your opinion, as am I to my own As I’ve said several times in my post, it’s possible that I’m wrong. But the facts line up. As far as professionalism goes, what would you have done?

I have posted on GarageGames forums about this issue (if you read my previous posts about GarageGames) and the thread got hidden so that potential customers do not see it on a search. I have talked to GarageGames employees and pointed out the issues and have received the usual answers about “We’re looking into these and will take some action if necessary.”

Again, you (and Tau, if he’s a real user – I still have my doubts given the fact that he came in fists swinging … but it’s possible that GG users are just fanatical about the product :p) miss the point – I’m not complaining about support per se. I’m complaining about the fact that they market a product as a “professional” level product but the product itself is not ready for primetime either performance-wise or documentation-wise.

If you’ve followed along the iTGB documentation, you’ll notice that the included documentation isn’t up-to-date. There are numerous errors. The default project is not set up properly and compiles incorrectly. Why would anybody pay a premium for these kinds of issues? They can be fixed easily and I’ve offered to help them fix these issues, but they’re not even willing to talk about it.

So tell me, how else should I go about highlighting these issues to other potential customers so that they’d be at least aware of these things going in? Instead of paying for a product that has no refunds and regretting it later?

“just like how they didnt respond to you via email as an anonymous email account.” – Not sure what you meant by that. Are you saying that they didn’t respond to me anonymously via e-mail? If so, aren’t you making an assumption because you couldn’t know that it did/or did not happen?

Again, read all three of my posts about GarageGames first, and then you might understand my point better. I’m not complaining about their support with regards to my experience with them – I can search the forums and find my answers well enough. But for a company to rely on their forums as the main means of support (when they could easily have added an FAQ and a better organized Wiki) to make things easier on users (especially for things like pre-sales questions) and then to censor their own forums when the feedback is not what they want, is poor form.